


The Amphora

by drawlight



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Biblical References, Cancer, Character Death, Death, Elegy, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt, Long-Term Relationship(s), Loss, Love, M/M, POV Harry Potter, Poetry, Post-Canon, Post-War, Whales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-18 14:13:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18701236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: The problem with love is that there will come a day when we will hold each other last.





	The Amphora

**Author's Note:**

> To hearts and their aches.  
> To the Reader, fair warning, there is little comfort here.

 

THESEUS

_Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend._

HERAKLES

_I fear to stain your clothes with blood._

THESEUS

_Stain them. I don't care._

Euripides, _Herakles_ _  
_ (Anne Carson, trans. From _Grief Lessons: Four Plays_ )

 

Let’s go.

_Where?_

Whale-watching. Let’s go to the end of the sea. Let’s go to the end of the world. Let’s look for beasts and their bellies. Pick the trash out of the sand and grass. I told a friend I would keep an eye out for the great blue.

_Have you ever seen one out here?_

No. It doesn't matter. I said I'd keep watch anyway.

 

* * *

 

Later, much later after this story, Harry will take up pottery. He likes the earthy smell, he likes the spin of the wheel. He likes to have something to touch and to mold. Something to do with his hands. He is never sure where to place them except here, when he sitting at the wheel, when he is throwing the clay. _Strange thing,_ he thinks (red dust in his blacknest hair), laughing at himself, _a Potter at the potter's wheel._

"The first amphorae," his instructor, Theophilia McDougal-Splank, says, "were found in the prehistoric period from the Caucasus to China. In Georgia, we can find the _kvevri,_ a version without handles, dating back eight-thousand years."

Amphorae, Harry learns, were given their names by the Greeks. Who hasn’t been given a name by the Greeks? They had named the branches of science, the sky, the earth, the sea. The Greeks had loved their curvaceous double-handled jars, they had painted their stories on them. In truth, it is a misnomer to say _painted,_ those black-dark heroes worked in with a clay slurry. A slip, a varnish. It would turn glossy and pitch-dark after firing. Before novels and scrolls, this is how we wrote things down.

It is odd, we look at the things we unearth, shattered and smashed. _It is only a broken jar_ , we say upon hearing of an archaeologist's treasure trove of arrowheads and dismembered pottery. This is where we are wrong. To piece the jar back together is to sew up bits of a lost story. Scraps of ourselves, buried out there in the dirt. In sand, under waves, beneath the snow.

 

* * *

 

He likes to come to the sea. Skip rocks across the surface tension, watching the sun at the horizon. Up and down the sun goes, to and fro. The rocks always sink. He does not understand the sun, how it can be counted on day after day after day. He can understand the rocks. There is a beginning (it there, in the center of his palm), there is a middle (the skip across the water, the entropy of the bounce), there is an end (as always, of course, the fall). It is easy to visit the sea, a brisk walk from his house. He comes often during his morning walk, around the rise of the sun, the coming of dawn. He comes at dusk too, these liminal spaces of the day.

Look at the cattails, the moss; look at the lichen on the rocks. In the winter, there is verglas and driven snow. It is not winter. It will be. All things come, all things go.

It is dusk. Severus will be home soon. Harry should get back. He has appointments often now. He usually goes alone. Harry picks up the leash, his mop of a dog, heads back to the house. Sometimes he glances over his shoulder with curious green-grass eyes, always looking for whales.

 

* * *

 

"What the blasted hell are you doing out there everyday?"

Harry shrugs, setting the paper sack on the counter. He gets out the eggs and the cream. Puts away the bread; puts away the butter. Don’t forget the beef, don’t let it sit out too long. ( _Is this for tonight or tomorrow’s dinner?_ ) He frowns at the headline proclaiming the storm of the century. "Whale-watching."

Severus scowls. A sneer on the thin lips, the rawboned face. It is his usual response. He has never been interested in staying still. Harry doesn't tell him about it. That the reports of cetacean sightings have gone up in past years. That, peering off the Scottish coasts, sometimes you can spy harbour porpoises and minke whales, humpbacks maybe. A bottlenose dolphin. Orcas, perhaps. He doesn't know why he's so fascinated, it had not started intentionally. The walks are good for a man, standing on the edge of forty years old. (Getting soft around the middle now.) So he had walked to the edge of the sea, watched the waves ripple the surface. There had been a man there once, with a vinyl net and smelling of salt and fish. "Oi there, you looking for whales?"

Harry had said yes. So, from then on, that's exactly what he did.

 

* * *

 

It is a Tuesday. September. Severus has invited him today.

“Come in,” the doctor says. The office smells like steel and plastic, the queer scent of cotton and bandages. Rubbing alcohol. Harry walks into the room, not sure of where to stand. Where to put his coat, where to set his paper. “Is this -?”

“Harry Potter,” Severus grunts, undignified in a paper gown. His hair looks out of place here, the modern office of this ward. It is too dark against the white eggshell paint of the walls. He belongs in castles and mountains, in front of a cauldron (in their bed). Harry looks around, taking in the vials, the blood pressure gauge, the needle disposal box. Odd how hospitals don’t vary much from Muggle to magical. There are wands here and spells. Skele-Gro and Pepper-Up. There are potions in the pharmacy and rarely pills. Still, someone’s got to check your heart, make sure it’s still going. Someone’s got to count your ribs and your toes. They don’t need stitches here to sew up skin yet, still, some things magic cannot touch.

Harry counts the tiles on the ceiling.

“And how is he related to you?” (The question asked for fifteen years. Still hinted at in the papers. In _The Daily Prophet_ , in _Witch Weekly_. Harry Potter has lived quietly with Severus Snape with no comment. The periodicals still list Harry as an eligible bachelor but everyone raises their eyebrows, gives a wink and a nudge.) 

Harry swallows. They have never talked about it, he and Severus. Have never tried to quantify the _something_ that is between them. It is like trying to name the interruption between the earth and the moon. They are locked, ever connected, ever orbiting. Their little bit of something left undisturbed. Severus gives his sharp eyes over (black as necrosis), those tallow-pale fingers tightening on the edge of the seat (white as whale fat).

“My partner.” (Harry tries not to fall.)

 

* * *

 

_Why are you telling me this?_

Because, someday, I will not be able to. Because, someday, we will all stand there on the shore. Because we always talk about the beginning and someone’s got to hear the end.

 

* * *

 

What is it like?

Let me tell you about cancer in the bone. The Oncologist-Healer had called it _osteosarcoma._ (It is a word that is foreign on Harry's tongue, strangely shaped and oddly-scented. By the end, it will be as familiar as bread. As common as air.)

"How long?" Harry asks, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. That is the only question. He knows that once it spreads to the lungs, the question is not if. It is when. He watches the clock, suspicious of the hours.  At the end, every minute is a trapdoor.

Severus had not asked. (Severus looks down at his blue-paper lap. Yes, this gown as offensive as a jaybird. His hair falling in serpents around him. In clumps. In black bars like a jail cell.)

"Six months."

He had been grateful then that they had six months and not one. Later, much later, Harry would imagine that a shorter length would have been better. In the first month, it had been easy to ignore. He could pretend that the way Severus grew tired so quickly was due to just overwork. The dark circles were never so unusual; Severus had never been without the bags under his eyes, the bleak colors of his lack of sleep. The pain came later. Harry watches the older man sit longer in bed, the easy chair, rubbing at his shins, his forearms. Trying to soothe out the ache. It never leaves. When the sick is in the bone, there is nowhere to hide. (You might be able to cut off your flesh. Remove the skin, remove the breast, remove the eye. Our treatments are removal and annihilation. You cannot pull out your bone.) Harry looks at the hand laid slack on the blanket. He wonders if he can enter Severus' cells, come in through osmosis, this back door of yourself. Can he ride the blood cells, dissolve himself into the plasma like salt? He can be salt, passing through Severus' body, critical to life.

 _Tell me, what is the point of magic if I cannot help you?_ _I'm supposed to take care of you._ Harry is used to saving. There is no enemy to strike, nowhere to point his wand. The Healers all shrug, offer their condolences, little bouquets of violets. _There is a time for reaping,_ they had said and sent the St. Mungo's chaplain in. (Severus had cursed at the poor chaplain, had thrown his cup of peaches at the poor bastard's head.)

After a month, Severus drops a flask. He is splashed with Acromantula venom, his skin breaking out in boils and hives. Harry takes his wand from his inner pocket (holly, yes, and phoenix feather too), heals up the wounded skin. Spells cannot do everything. Even after, for days, Severus’ skin is still pink where it had been healed, tender as a sunburn.

"You should rest for a while," Harry says. Neither of them address the fact that only half of the sentence is true. Severus should rest, but there is no end point to it. There is no _a while._

"I need to work," Severus gripes. (The voice still slithers into Harry all this time later. Dark as a cave, dangerous to go alone. That sharp enunciation, the way Severus can pull on Harry’s want with a drawl and hooded eyes. More still, when Harry can make that burnt-ends voice break with need, Harry’s mouth between his thighs, Severus reduced to a gravelspit rumble and cheap Cokeworth accent saying _yes yes yes oh god fuck, who taught you to do this, no one has ever touched you but me, have they? oh fuck, yes, god, harry._ )

“I need to work,” Severus repeats, looking at the shattered glass.

Later, that is taken too. He falls in the shower. Sometimes he can blame it on the soap, a slippery nothing of a floor. The betrayal of porcelain. This time, it had hurt. This time, he needed help. (Harry had turned the water off, helped him to bed with water and paracetamol. Taken the dryer, dried and brushed the long night of hair.)

 

* * *

 

“I told them today. Ron and Hermione. Minerva.”

“What did they say?”

“Asked after you. If we needed anything.”

“Do we?”

“No.”

 

* * *

 

We always adjust to our surroundings quicker than we expect. Harry comes to learn new things. There are no more appointments. They are stays now. They start with simple overnights. Then weekends. Weeks. Harry prides himself on efficiency, keeping their overnight bags packed. He keeps extra books for Severus, his preferred tea, his favorite fountain pen. He learns a new rhythm like an eleven-year-old boy had walked into a castle. Not arithmancy this time, not chocolate frogs and pumpkin juice. Instead, a sea of white. Starched sheets and bleach. The smell of plastic and aluminum. Stainless steel. The sound of the endless telly, the drift of meals and tea. Sleep, sometimes. Powder blue blankets, non-slip socks. The pinch of an IV into the hand, the bend of the arm. _Try not to move it._ Boredom, mostly.

“Do you want to watch something?” (It is an old habit to say that, Harry does not catch it before it is out of his mouth. Severus and his lost vision, blinded now. Sometimes, to pass the minutes, the long hours, they listen to it drone.)

“No.”

“Is there something you do want?”

Severus sighs. “Read to me, Potter.”

So Harry does.

 _I will tell you stories_ , he says to the blind man. He does not know where to start so they work through, finish the book. He is antsy. His foot bounces, his fingers tap on the table. _Stop, Harry. You will give me a godforsaken migraine._ An odd paradox, this truth that, at the end as we run out of time, we have too many minutes. Too many minutes and not enough years. Harry is too familiar with the vending machines, too familiar with hospital visiting hours, too familiar with morphine drips and saline solutions. There is no time at all to do anything but wait.

It's a bitter melon, a bit of ash on the tongue. An uncoated pill to swallow that sometimes he cannot stand to be here, cannot stand to listen to the aconite of Severus, to watch the flush of the IV, the wrench of pain when the morphine runs dry. Severus often sleeps. (The scrawl on the whiteboard. _Severus Snape, 59 years old._ ) When he does, Harry wanders. The halls and their echoes, their busy staff with blankets and vitals checks. Then, sometimes, the car park. The concrete path and its wildflowers. The river beyond. He thinks about stories. Severus had asked for stories. (There is nothing to do but sit back and listen.) Some of the first stories are ache. Thespis, our first actor, was called _the father of tragedy._ Some of those first painted jars we have ever found had had their long-told bitterness painted on the side.

Severus had asked for stories. So Harry puts his hands in the sand, feeling for clay, collecting them up one by one by one.

 

* * *

 

_A story: Once upon a time, there was a beast in a castle._

 

* * *

 

“Not that one.”

“Why?”

“It’s saccharine and idiotic.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “You got something else in mind?”

“Get the book there.” (The book sticking out of his black leather overnight bag.)

Blue-covered. Harry runs his hands over the pages, the title, the author’s name.

 

* * *

 

_Once upon a time, Grendel lived in the dark below the waves. When he woke, he could still hear the claustrophobic snores of his mother._

 

* * *

 

They are good at skirting the truth.

“I love your hands,” Harry says.

“You desperately need to re-evaluate your opinions, Potter. Your decisions are _sorely_ lacking.”

“Yeah?” Harry quirks his lip, Severus raising his elevator brows and setting the hot tea down on the metal tray. “Then why do you put up with me?”

“You are the least objectionable person,” Severus says, arch like a cat, lifting his chin in a challenge. Harry only grins, he is very adept at speaking _Severus Snape._

( _I love you_ can be said so many ways. They are Englishmen, speaking English. But the Romanians say _te iubesc._ The Spanish say _te amo_ . Cats and their slow blink. We do not need _I love you,_ not really. Let us say it other ways. The brush of hair from a sweaty face, the shout of you above me, flowers from the corner shop. There are other ways for hearts and their beats.)

 

* * *

 

_Cancer: A collection of diseases caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body, dangerous if it spreads to other areas._

_Metastasis: The development of secondary malignant growths at a distance from a primary site of cancer._

_Bone: A rigid organ that constitutes part of the vertebrate skeleton._

 

* * *

 

Cancer confounds even the best scientists. We know the route; we know the destination. We do not always know why the crow flies south, why the whale aims north. Our bodies, fumbling towards entropy.

At first, he tried to learn quietly, always on his own. Hermione and her soft eyes, telling him of research papers and timelines. He slips into the Dover library, trying to make sense of it. Cancer. It is easier with viruses and bacteria. With the plague or influenza, we can point an accusing finger, say yes yes yes this is the problem, Our antibiotics like a cocked gun, a missile launch. A little _fuck you, buddy_ right to the heart of the problem.

Cancer is different. There is nothing to blame. We look suspiciously at the X-rays we've taken, at the water we've drank. Maybe, maybe we had stayed too long in the sun. Stood too close to microwaves. Drank too much wine. In the end, it is only our own bodies to blame. Tell me, break it down. What is cancer but too much of ourselves? Our lives are the story of atoms stuck together in this unusual configuration. We can borrow eighty to ninety years if we are lucky. Yes, borrow them against the universe. When we look at each other, we forget that these atoms had existed before and will exist again later. We have been stars and the oceans once, perhaps we will be again. Eventually, our piles erode into entropy. We break loose, ignore our own rules.

(You were a star once, you will be again. Do not panic. These are the bylaws we signed.)

Severus has always been too much. Too much ache and too much spit. Too much vinegar. Harry remembers a man in a too-long robe with a too-big nose and a too-skinny mouth staring at him with too much rage. Why is it a surprise that he would someday produce too much of himself here too?

Severus Snape, his body and their too many osteoblasts, producing too much bone.

He had asked questions.

"Does it hurt?"

"Yes, obviously." _It will hurt more._ They do not talk about it. Never. They do not talk about the way Severus bruises, the books that slip from his cramping hands. (The ache in their hearts. Better to never speak of it, never let it breathe. Keep those ugly heads unreared.)

“Can I touch you - even though it hurts?”

“If you do not, Potter, I will invent new curses to pull you limb from limb.”

Harry is gentle in his touches, his fingers on Severus’ pulse point. (This is the only time Severus does not scowl. Harry can read it anyway, the tightening of the eyes, the intake of breath.)

“Is it too much?”

“No," Severus says with his mouth, with his hands, his bleak touch. _No, never._ After all this time, these fifteen years of the swells and divots of Harry, he still presses his fingers in with desperation, that sense of _don't you dare slip away._ It is like drowning to be under that India ink stare, that darkness spreading out from the eyes and staining everything in sight. It is overwhelming. The second before a bomb catches, the oxygen winked out at once. Fires must eat too, we give them all our air. Like staring into the mouth of a whale, rolling down the carpet of a tongue.

 _I want you._ (Still now, after all this time. Harry had assumed, once and incorrectly, that passion was the right of youth, that here at the edge of forty and sixty, there was nothing but grocery lists and aerobics classes, vacation funds for Majorca, for saying _close up the windows, will you, it looks like rain._ No, we should warn the young, that muscles get stronger with practice. That the heart is a muscle, loving more and more as it goes. Yes, Harry knows, he has been wrong all this time.)

Some things are different now. Severus is a living wound, wrapped up in bruised skin. A bruised plum, tender at the bone. Harry goes softly, gently. Yes, up and down the chest with a touch like a cat's whiskers, the brush of a fish against the calf. He can feel Severus' pulse speed up, feel the blood (thick with white blood cells, macrophages and lymphocytes) rush against his palm. _I know you. Let me make love to you._ Love with an old lover is not a new discovery, it is like taking a favorite book down from the shelf, opening the page to your beloved passages.

_Let me read you. Read to you. Let me swallow you whole, my dark mouth. Let me love you with my sea-monster body, my whale body. I have a belly for you, empty and waiting. Come on, deep down there. Curl up inside of me. When God calls, I will keep you safe._

 

* * *

 

“Treatment will prolong your life.”

“Is it a cure?”

“No.”

“How much longer?”

“Two or three months.” (Not even until the spring.)

“Then no.”

After, Ron asks Harry if that had been the right choice. He bites his lip, staring at the woodgrain of the bar counter, counting the bubbles in his pint. He doesn’t know. It had never been his question to answer.

 

* * *

 

_Once upon a time, God commanded Jonah. Go forth and prophecy against Nineveh, God said. And Jonah shook his head, shook out his bag, grabbed his walking stick and boarded a ship to Tarshish. God, furious at being had, sent a storm. When Jonah is tossed overboard, took the fall, fell below the waves, tell me, what did he see? The black mouth of the whale._

 

* * *

 

"Read to me." (Severus cannot hold books long. They cramp his hands.)

"What?"

"That one over there. Near the window."

"Let me get it."

 

* * *

 

"What do you want," Harry asks, "you know, after?"

"I don't care, Potter. Drop me in the ocean. Set me on fire. Just don't put me in a tomb."

"Cremation?"

"Just don't bury me."

"Alright."

“What will you do?” Severus asks. Harry sits on the bed, propped up by the pillows, his fingers threaded in Severus’ hair. Black always, black as the ink on the prescription pad, black as the base of the hospital bed. Shot through with the irongrey of a musketlock. (The hair is thinning. Harry finds it in the shower. He cleans it up, says nothing.)

Harry shrugs. He doesn’t know how to answer that. _I love you._ He wants to say it but they have never said this. It is no kindness to Severus to say it, Harry knows that it would make the other man uncomfortable, make his shoulders bunch up into that strange hunch of pressure. It would only be a kindness to Harry, it festers like an infection, untreated and gangrenous, getting worse all the time. Sometimes, when he wanders the aisles at Tesco, looking for new brands of Earl Grey, for seven-grain bread, for milk, sometimes he whispers it to himself. It takes the edge off.

 _I will miss you._ (He doesn't say it. It is for his benefit and no one else's. Don't force the dying to mourn the living.)

 _I’ll never leave you._ It’s not true, is it? You will; I will. Sooner or later, all things must go. One of us will ache. In the end, we join together in that black oblivion. It’s not that we will stop needing each other, it’s only that we will no longer know that we should.

Atoms again (atoms always).

 

* * *

 

Harry hasn’t spent much time in church.

He is surprised that this is where it ends, here under a crucifix in this strangely Byzantine structure. A priest and his quiet drone, the damp eyes. Few have come. Some had given their regrets ( _“Got a thing that day, Harry. I can’t miss it. So sorry for your loss.”_ )

It hadn’t been for Severus, it had been Harry’s doing, trying to shake the world a final time. It hadn’t mattered. No one watched. Harry had asked the other man, “How do you want it?”

How had he said it exactly? “ _I don’t give a damn at all.”_

 _I watched you. I watched you this whole time._ It hadn't gone how he had expected. Once, age seventeen, he had spread out his hands and held in the blood of Severus Snape. His fingertips and their whorls, pressed at the ravaged neck, at the pulse. Holding the heartbeat of the older man in his hands. He had been strong enough then. He could hold fast the beating of the heart. 

“Don’t worry, Harry,” they say, whoever they are. (There are many of these little words.) “He’s in a better place. You’ll see him again someday.” He closes his eyes, his fists, his throat. A scream crawls up his throat, a rush of blood to his cheeks. _A better place._ Do they know their own words? What place? What empty, dusty hall of ghosts does Severus inhabit?  We are not so long for this world. You and I, our interruption of flesh in a universe of plasma and dark matter. Then, nothing. We die in stages. First, the body. Yes, that's the one to go. Then primary sources, as our loved ones and acquaintances hang up their coats and shuffle off too. Maybe stories live on and peter out. Usually, generally, the last thing to go is our name, erased by storm and sand from our meager tombstones. We go to our graves saying _this is our final resting place._ What a joke, finality. Just wait until the graverobbers come. The new ones with the fancy shovels called archaeologists. They’ll dig up our bones, our little treasures. Put us on display in a museum. There is no finality. No forever. No _nothing._

What is left? Bits and pieces, old pottery. Shattered clay.

Harry frowns at the priest and his gentle smile. "Give a memory of him to God," the priest says.

 

* * *

 

_What about his eyes?_

Harry remembers (sometimes that is all you have left, memory). Yes, they were black.

_How black?_

As black as what Jonah saw, inside of the whale.

 

* * *

 

After, after, Harry had needed to do something with his hands. They did not ache, they did not settle.

"You should try a craft," Hermione says, "Get out of the house some. It's been a year. Maybe meet some people."

She is right, she is often right. (He can hear Severus in his mind, _quit being a bloody martyr, you fool._ ) He looks at the postings in Hogsmeade. Takes up pottery. There at the wheel, covered in dust, he makes a jar of red clay, tall and curved. Yes, there, with two handles on either side of the neck. Eventually, he might paint it with black paint. Perhaps. Maybe.

When they give him Severus' ashes, he puts them inside.

_I love you._

He does not say it to the jar, to the ashes. There is no phoenix to pity him, human remains don't rise again.  _I love you,_ he says. To the sea, to the creatures in it, holding things fast and safe.

_I love you, I love you, I love you._

 

* * *

 

_What about his hair?_

Yes, Harry remembers. It was dark.

_How dark?_

As dark as the winter sky at the North Pole, never knowing the sun.

 

* * *

 

_We have gone too far. I want to go back. Tell me what happened, tell me the end._

Very well.

 

* * *

 

(It is not the last day; it is the last good day. Those who are left always learn the distinction.)

Harry sits on the bed. He is unsure if he should rest a hand on Severus' leg. Everything pains him.

“I hate this,” Severus hisses, “I hate that you see me like this. Disgusting and rank and foul and -“

“ _Severus_.”

The night train of a man stops. He coughs, racking and aching. He might spit out his bones. Peel his lungs off of his pleura like a sticker from its sheet. The room smells already of death. Severus gets cold easily, he keeps the windows closed. Harry learns that death smells like stale air and sweat, like waiting and dull hours. Like hospital coffee, like bleach.

“You’re falling asleep in your chair," Severus says. "You shouldn't Apparate this tired, you'll splinch yourself, you idiot boy."

“I’m fine.”

“Go home, Potter.”

“I’ll stay.”

“Why?" Severus growls, "I’m obviously not going anywhere.”

Harry sighs, gathering up his jacket with its visitor tag. His housekeys. His wallet. “Are you sure you’re alright on your own?”

Severus raises the call light. Green and bright in the dim room. The nurse station beyond the door. Harry nods.

“Okay, I’ll see you in the morning.” He pauses at the door, looking back at the man in the bed. “Sleep well. Call me if you need me.”

(He will be difficult to rouse in the morning, will not put names to faces. Harry learns that not all breaks are clean.)

When we fall in love, we have a _beginning._ The problem with beginnings is that you must have endings. It lurks at the edges of our minds and we do the shopping and go to barbecues, swim in the ocean, brush our teeth, fuck on a dirty floor, yes, all these things, without ever addressing the knock at the door. It always comes. There is a time we will touch last.

How will it go? Whose eyes will close first? Whose hand will be pressed to chapped, dry lips for this hello and goodbye? That is the trick of it, we never get to know.

Someday then, goodbye.

Let me tell you the trick. There is a difference between a story and the truth. I have a story to tell you. In tales, we look for structure, for growth. There is no mistake that we use the same word _resolution_ for solving a problem as wrapping up a narrative.

But we are not stories, you and I. It is not like that. In a story, they would say _I love you._ It might hurt a little but we can go on to our breakfasts and workdays knowing that in the end, at least, they were loved and loved in return. In truth, we have no resolutions. There is only the march of time, there is only how we get through the day. In the end, sometimes, the greatest kindness is saying nothing at all.

Harry says _I love you_ to a sleeping bit of skin and bones, who wakes into nothing and sleeps into nothing and will never know of it all.

 

* * *

 

_A story: Once upon a time, I loved you._

 

* * *

 

Out here, a man standing on the sand, looking out to the sea. He holds the red-clay jar, unpainted. (The story is inside.) Look for the whales, out there free and ancient. Cough up your Jonahs, give them back. _Give him back to me._

Ashes to ashes then. Dust to the sea.

 

 

Art by likelightinglass.

**Author's Note:**

> I must give credit where it belongs. This was inspired by many things, not the least by mad_lori's beautiful piece of heartwrench, Alone on the Water. As always, to my inspirations. To Anne Carson and Euripides. To the ancients, telling stories.


End file.
